Silvopasture may prove a handy way to expand grazing areas

Instead of farmers or ranchers just
turning their livestock into a woodland to graze, experts say they should
consider an alternative that’s better for the forest, the soil, their
livestock’s nutrition, and their pocketbook: silvopasture.

Farmers and ranchers are no strangers
to agroforestry, which includes all manner of farming the forest: logging;
growing fruit, Christmas trees or other crops; and/or grazing animals in
woodlands. Silvopasturing is agroforestry that steps up the diversification and
management intensity, mixing strict rotational grazing with expanded long-term
forage, timber and other forest production.

“Pastures with scattered shade trees,
loafing areas to escape the heat and flies, or dense woods with sparse
understories of edible plants are not silvopastures,” says Brett Chedzoy, a
Cornell Cooperative Extension specialist who silvopastures tracts on his own
rural New York farm.

“People confuse it with old-style forest grazing,” long seen as damaging
to woodlands,” he says. “But silvopasturing is dynamic. You thin
the tree canopy and light starts coming into the understory and things start to
happen. Then your livestock becomes your tool to help you manage the land.”

Mark Kopecky, soil agronomist for Organic Valley, which has
1,800 organic producers in 34 states, believes only a handful of its members
have tried silvopasture. But he thinks it would serve many of them well,
especially in the hot climes across the Southeast, Southwest and southern
Midwest. That's largely because the shade both relieves stress for livestock
and cools the ground, allowing higher quality forage to flourish. He says
excess sunlight and heat degrade tall fescue grass, for example, but the fescue
becomes much more digestible and nutritious in a good silvopasture.

Many livestock owners are seeing a scarcity of pasture
available for grass-fed and free-range cattle, pigs and poultry. Consider the
aggregates: U.S. sales of organic food have passed $36 billion a year and has been jumping more than 10 percent a
year since 2010, while sales products from grass-fed and free-range animals
have been soaring for years. On the other hand, the 2012 Census of Agriculture
says acreage of U.S. pastureland is 8 percent less than in 1997; pastured
woodlands on farms, 10 percent less.

Kopecky says the supply of grazing land is a mixed bag:
Most parts of the country have enough land available for grazing, but many
small dairy farms and other livestock operations, such as those of his Amish
members in Pennsylvania, have limited space. Or, he says, pastureland that may
be available in the Midwest is too dispersed geographically. So silvopasture
may offer such farms a good way to add grazing area.

But one thing
silvopasture ain't is simple. For example, Chedzoy says, “the managers must be
able to identify plant species and their relative feed value, as well as
methods for shifting understory plant communities to a more desirable
composition for grazing purposes.”

So far, the practice has been tried most often in
Southeast pine forests where rain is usually plentiful. But some ranchers and
foresters are trying it in the drier West, with some using ponderosa pine as the canopy. Richard Straight, agroforester with the National
Agroforestry Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, says ponderosa stands are usually
thinner than lodgepole pine, Douglas fir and other western evergreens, and
don't need as dense of a stand as other western pines to flourish. So he says
ponderosa may work well in developing silvopasture's diversified forest or
grassland settings.

But as in other regions, Straight says, silvopasturing
in the West “is more complicated than just grazing cattle in an open pasture,
or just raising trees for lumber.” There, it is most typically practiced for
grass-fed cattle or sheep, whether organic or not. Besides boosting quality and
quantity of forage that would be produced on the usual forest floor, it spells less
heat stress for animals, becomes a means of controlling invasive and
undesirable plants, and the frequent grazing rotations reduce damage associated
with loafing livestock. “Plus you can still finish your cattle in the feedlot
if you want,” he notes.

One silver lining for
anyone trying to go organic with a new silvopasture is a possibly abbreviated
period to be certified. Sam Jones-Ellard, with the
USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, says the certification process can begin
right away if a producer can show that no pesticides or other prohibited
substances have been used on the land for at least three years. He notes that
producers would still need to comply with other organic crop and livestock rules.

Need
help with silvopasture?

Want
help planning or upgrading a silvopasture? There are plenty of resources
available:

You
can also join a national agroforestry forum for online consults
about silvopasture problems, discoveries and successes. And organic producers
may want to consult the farmers' advisory council of the Organic Trade Association.

Plenty
of solid online info is available to learn if silvopasture is right for you,
how to get started and so forth. A
concise intro from a Western forests perspective is found here; Southeast region, here; Northeast, here. And USDA's National
Agroforestry Center offers an online silvopasture library, too.

Plus
Brett Chedsoy, a Cornell University
extension specialist in rural New York, provides a lot of coaching on the On Pasture website.

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